Posts Tagged With: Muhammad

If you had known me, you would have known my father. From now on you do know him! You have seen him. . . . Anyone who has seen me has seen the father! (14:7, 9)

What a provocative claim! When you look at Jesus, you are looking at God. Jesus only makes it clearer the further we read through this chapter:

Don’t you believe that I am in the father, and the father is in me? (14:10a)

It’s the father, who lives within me . . . . (14:10b)

I am in the father and the father is in me. (14:11)

If we have only known Christianity all of our life, maybe we don’t really appreciate how outstanding this claim was. What other significant religious leader in history has claimed such a thing? Would Muhammad have claimed such a thing? Not at all! That would have been blasphemous and worthy of death. Would the Buddha have claimed to have been a god? Though people have turned him into such, the Buddha was clear before his death that he was not a god, did not wish to be worshiped as deity, and did not even want to theorize about divinity anyway as he was simply interested in solving the problem of human suffering. Would Abraham or Moses or Rabbi Hillel? This too would have been highly offensive. The Jews of Jesus’ time were ready to stone Jesus for claiming such. Maybe one of the 330 million Hindu gods would have claimed to be a god taken human form in order to reveal the nature of the great universal power of Brahman to the unenlightened world. But what Hindu in recorded history has ever had a run in with these gods of legend? Besides, the fleshly body is but an illusion that the gods help us escape, why would they want to become flesh? Marx thought religion and its gods were just an “opiate” for the hungry, disillusioned masses. Freud would have said a god was just a projection of your superego. Any good secular humanist would either laugh at the idea that a god even exists, or if one does that god is not at all involved in this closed system we call our universe. And into that world, those of us who are Christians claim Jesus is God in the flesh. Truly provocative! And what a privilege to serve such a god!

And if the claim that God came to this world to reveal himself as a human named Jesus is not scandalous enough, the shock continues.

But you know him, because he [the helper; the Holy Spirit] lives with you, and will be in you. (14:17)

Not only did God condescend to live in the flesh as a human named Jesus, God lives in those of us who are Christians by way of the Holy Spirit. What other religion in the world claims that the god would come to live in us? Judaism and Islam are religions of the book; God has done all that is necessary when he gave us a book. God does not need to come down to our level and it would be unfitting of God to do so. The eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism would agree that there is divinity in the follower, but there is a spark of the divine in all living things. This is no special honor. And this piece of the divine Brahman power has no real consciousness and does not guide us into better living. A secular humanist is no more convinced that God, if he exists, would indwell us than he did Jesus. How audacious to believe that our God actually lives within us! Again, a great privilege!